Since the Great Financial Crisis, emerging market economies (EMEs) have made much progress on enhancing their frameworks to manage banking crises. Yet significant challenges remain. Banking sectors and bank ownership are more concentrated in EMEs than in advanced ecomonies (AEs), and banks fund...

In this brief, Biagio Bossone of the International Monetary Fund evaluates narrow banking from the perspective of modern theories of financial intermediation. These theories portray the status quo banking system as a solution to otherwise intractable problems of imperfect information, risk, and...